Two Innovative Pilots

This year OUP is trialling two different OA funding models. Up until now OUP’s gold OA publishing outside of journals has largely been funded by processing charges for individual books, paid for by research funders or individual institutions. The two new initiatives look to fund OA on a much larger scale via diamond OA models that OUP has adopted and refined:

• Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO): Commit to Open seeks funding from the academic library community for the OA publication of 30 participating books. While other publishers have launched similar initiatives, the novelty here is our aim for radical openness:
  
  
• the 30 titles are announced up front.
• we have no minimum commitment threshold for publishing a book under an OA licence.
• progress will be publicized monthly.
  
  
• Max Planck Encyclopedias of International Law, the market-leading international law resource published by OUP, will be among the first non-journal publications to adopt the Subscribe to Openmodel (S2O). A range of publishers have tried out S2O with journals, where current subscribers are asked to continue to pay each year so that existing content can be made free to all, and new content is published under an OA license. So long as a high enough proportion of existing subscribers renew, the paywall is removed for a year, and then the process repeats the following year.

For OUP, finding ways to expand our OA offering is a perfect fit with our mission. It helps us to seize the opportunity that digital distribution offers for the unlimited dissemination of scholarship. That said, we are also acutely aware that paid-for OA can present risks of lower quality thresholds, and that there is a perception that OA books in particular are in some sense lesser than non-OA books.

For that reason, each book in our Commit to Open program was carefully selected for this pilot. Each went through the same rigorous peer- and internal -review process and was slated for regular sale as part of OSO before being pulled into Commit to Open. All of them would fare very well as commercial projects but we are excited to bring these works to an even broader community of readers through the program, and we look forward to seeing how they contribute to this developing model. Another key community element of the initiative is the inclusion of authors and topics that still struggle to attract funding for OA publishing: a “Support New Voices” collection by authors who are within six years of their first academic appointment, and a Humanities collection.

In the case of the Encyclopedias, they are already the most trusted source in the field. The importance for the community here lies in the nature of the content. International law deals with highly topical issues of global justice and equality—knowledge of it has the potential to benefit students, scholars, civil society activists, and practitioners everywhere. To make such a trusted resource freely available to the whole world would represent a significant public good.

Sustainability

What determines whether a pilot becomes a program? As mentioned, we use pilots to answer questions of sustainability and replication. In the case of Commit to Open, it is very labour-intensive to do it the way we have chosen e.g. agreeing all of the titles upfront, and the manual processes needed to implement a novel funding model. If the pilot is successful, we will need to work out whether it is sustainable to carry it out again, whether to expand it, and what permanent systems need to be put in place to support the program.

With Subscribe to Open the challenge is a different one. Operationally it is simplicity itself—absolutely nothing changes other than that the paywall is removed, so long as renewals hold up. But therein lies the risk: the (understandable) temptation for some subscribers to wait and see and take advantage of free access.

But those are questions for further down the line. Our immediate concern is getting engagement from the community and hearing responses to these initiatives, something we are very much hoping to achieve in OA Week.

You can find out more about Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO): Commit to Open in our upcoming librarian webinar on Tuesday, November 26, 2024. Sign up here.

Featured image by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels.